Imagine a knock on your door and a child protection worker from the Department of Human Services produces a protection order, demanding to take away your obese child and, in effect, accusing you of gross neglect. Pure imagination? Big brother gone mad? Kafkaesque?
So has anyone, including a government, got the right to tell us how to behave?- Maurice Cauchi
And yet this is precisely what is being considered in ‘developed’ countries like Australia with a view to exert pressure on parents to take more seriously their responsibility for the health of their children.
There is no doubt that in Malta, like the rest of the Western world, there is an epidemic of obesity the like of which has not been a feature in the history of mankind.
It is also a fact that this epidemic is affecting children and adults alike.
We are also all aware of the disastrous complications that obesity is sure to lead to. Ample advice and admonitions have been showered by the health authorities on an unresponding public.
The result is an ever-increasing load on the health services, with increasing queues and waiting lists at our hospitals.
Whose responsibility is this?
Obesity is not the child of one factor: it has many parents.
It has a genetic basis, making some of us more liable to put on weight than others.
It is familial, where some habits are born.
It is an economic and social issue, with more people indulging in gargantuan celebrations.
It is a result of a way of life, with more sedentary occupations and more leisure time spent in front of a television screen or indulging in electronic games rather than exercise.
It is to be noted that overeating, like smoking and drinking, is to some extent an acquired habit.
In our society we eat not because we are hungry, but because it is the time to do so, or because we are with friends, or because we are celebrating.
Food provides a feeling of happiness, of confirming us in our view that all is well with the world.
When we are challenged by any life stresses we find solace in food.
The result is we consume more than we need, and we have less and less occasion to burn it.
So has anyone, including a government, got the right to tell us how to behave?
How far should governments interfere with our choice of lifestyle, irrespective of the fact that they would be doing it for our own good?
Governments are not expected to interfere with our ‘negative rights’ (a terminology famously introduced by Isaiah Berlin), which include our right to choose whatever lifestyle we like as long as it does not impinge on the rights of our neighbours.
And yet it is the government (and the taxpayer) who has to face the eventual bill of providing the facilities for diagnosis and treatment, not to mention the millions of hours lost in absenteeism from sickness and ill-health.
And finally, how far are parents responsible for the sins of their children?
One could repeat that example provides the best motivation: children do not do what they are told but what they see.
Parents could also review the changing needs of our society and make drastic changes to the culinary delights inherited over generations, including curbing our penchant for starchy and sweet foods.
More importantly, overseeing the habits of their children becomes more mandatory, as well as more difficult when parents have to leave their children unsupervised.
The problem is obvious.
The solution seems to be impossibly difficult.